


be that hopeful feeling when eden was lost

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: tell my father (this is my life) [6]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Healing, Male-Female Friendship, NO FUCKING INCEST IN MY HOUSE, No Apocalypse, Recovery, Sibling Bonding, Siblings, Trans Diego Hargreeves, Trans Male Character, eudora/diego is important both platonically and romantically, he's a dumbass with a heart of gold, hey you fucks, howevs you feel abt it is cool, i stan (1) mama's boy, it's very important either way, patch is back bitches, you will pry this headcanon from my cold dead hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-07 07:50:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17956529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: They hook up a few times, in the years after he leaves and she stays. She's strict on crime scenes and not as open with him as she used to be, but they still work. They still tease and banter and carry on a pretty decent friends-with-benefits type relationship.Then Ben, the second last Hargreeves at home, dies, and Diego doesn't really feel like having a relationship like this anymore. He doesn't feel like engaging much at all with the people close to him at all, except in distant conversations.Because Ben stayed, and was a hero, and he died. He always cared the most about others out of any of them, and look where that got him.At the funeral, a statue goes up. Diego can't bring it in himself to care. For six years, he can't really find it in himself to care.It's not much a surprise that it takes another funeral to make him snap back into caring about himself and the people he loves, not just strangers. Dad dies and something in Diego realizes that things can change for the better. He doesn't want to be like Dad, uncaring and distant.  He wants to be better.He just doesn't really know how to do that.





	be that hopeful feeling when eden was lost

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Be" by Hozier, because I'm still a ho for his music after four years.
> 
> Trans!Diego is a headcanon y'all can never pry from my cold dead hands, because Klaus will bring me back to defend his brother's honor so y'all just keep that in mind, kids.  
>    
> (Also hi just dropping in to say the show never confirms when/how Ben died so I can do whatever I want okay bye-)

_Ultimately, the universe doesn't care about us._

_Time doesn't care about us._

_That's why we have to care about each other._

**-David Levithan**

 

Diego doesn’t have a proper deadname, and for that he can’t help but feel grateful, in some shitty way. His old name is more associated with his life under Dad, not a wrongly ascribed gender.

By the time he came out, Mom was helping him and all his siblings choose their own names. His decision to go with ‘Diego’ wasn’t any stranger than Klaus naming himself after a character from a children’s book series or Vanya’s to give herself a name from the country she was born in or Luther to name himself after a villain in a comic book series. They all have their own deadnames, in one way or another, their numbers that labeled them as weapons and not children.

(Diego telling his siblings that he wasn’t their sister, but their brother- they accepted that. It wasn't any stranger than their powers, after all. Dad had accepted it, in his own nose-upturned sort of way, with Mom being programmed to give Diego the proper hormone treatments to keep him from going through the wrong puberty. Dad didn’t care what gender his kids were, just that they obeyed his rules. He was a dick, but it was a particular kind of dick.)

When someone calls him by his number, it’s not like they’re misgendering him- it feels more like they’re stripping away his identity until all he is is a weapon, a number in a list, a single part of the Umbrella Academy machine. And he's not, not anymore. He is Diego Hargreeves, dumbass and total mess and human with his own goddamn name. 

-

Eudora was the first friend he made when he left the Academy, the first one other than his siblings to accept him as himself. He'd been unsure in his identity as anything other than Diego Hargreeves, male, but he hadn't had to prove even that fact to her. He'd been constantly misgendered by magazines and talk shows, but Patch hadn't done that. She'd accepted his gender without question, content to argue with him about anything else, from the stock market to the local basketball team to tactics on the field to who should have won this season of American Idol.

So maybe Diego is a bit sharp at the edges- Patch is, too. She’s gentle with witnesses, a really good cop-in-training, but with him she's rough and argumentative. He kind of likes it, honestly. She's honest with him in a blunt but caring sort of way that no one has ever been before.

So of course he's gonna fuck it up, because Diego doesn't know how to take care of the good things and people in his life.

They fight when he quits the Police Academy the week before they're set to graduate. It's their biggest argument yet, and this time there's no friendly teasing or jokes. This time, it's a full-blown fight with shouting and anger and no punches pulled.

She wants to know why Diego's throwing away all his hard work, and he wants to explain, but he can't. He can't put into words his reasons for leaving, and he's sure that if he tried he'd just stammer his way through the explanation.

They hook up a few times, in the years after he leaves and she stays. She's strict on crime scenes and not as open with him as she used to be, but they still work. They still tease and banter and carry on a pretty decent friends-with-benefits type relationship. 

And honestly, it's pretty nice. He likes her a lot as a friend, and the sex is pretty great. He doesn't really feel anything towards her romantically, and he really values her opinion on things. He's pretty sure she feels the same about him. 

Then Ben, the second last Hargreeves at home, dies, and Diego doesn't really feel like having a relationship like this anymore. He doesn't feel like engaging much at all with the people close to him at all, except in distant conversations.

Because Ben stayed, and was a hero, and he died. He always cared the most about others out of any of them, and look where that got him.

At the funeral, a statue goes up. Diego keeps seeing Klaus fidgeting about, glancing in weird places, and he wonders if Klaus is high as hell or if he's seeing Ben.

Diego can't bring it in himself to care. For six years, he can't really find it in himself to care. He goes through life, being a superhero in name and sometimes in action, protecting people vigilante-style, and he lives alone and doesn't really talk to Patch or any of his siblings much.

It's not much a surprise that it takes another funeral to make him snap back into caring about himself and the people he loves, not just strangers. Dad dies and something in Diego realizes that things  _can_ change for the better. He doesn't want to be like Dad, uncaring and distant. He wants his friendship with Patch and his relationship with his siblings back. He wants to be better.

He just doesn't really know how to do that.

-

He kills Mom. He puts his fingers in her arm and-

He's killed plenty of people before. All of the Umbrella Academy has. But with Mom- it's different. She's not a criminal. She’s the first person he came out to, the woman who taught him how to control his stutter and zip his jacket and cook a mean  _enchilada._

He's been a Mama's boy since he was a kid, and he's always been proud of it. It didn't matter that his mother's a robot, that she was just programmed to be that way- he's loved her since he was a kid, when all he cared about was who comforted him and loved him. His siblings and him were too occupied with competing to truly bond, and so he'd turned to Mom.

So killing her- that might just have been one of the worst moments of his life. 

-

Diego gets to the hotel room and all he finds is Patch’s dead body. Patch, his best friend, his arguing-partner, is now forever his ex-something. He’s never gonna get the chance to thank her properly for everything she’s supported him through, to apologize for all the shit he's put her through.

His brother’s gone from the scene, and Diego hopes he's okay, but Patch is fucking  _dead_. She's gone, and it's all because of his stupid family and those fucking assassins and dammit, dammit,  _god fucking damn it_ -

Diego knows what he’s talking about when he asks Klaus about the one person who he loves with all his being. No, he wasn’t _that_ in love with Patch, but he did feel a lot towards her. When she died, he lost someone who had accepted and cared for him.

Maybe love's too strong a word for the friendship and relationship they had, but it was definitely something.

-

Mom comes back, and Diego blinks back tears. He's lost his best friend, but not his mother. He's at least got that.

-

When the Apocalypse doesn’t go down, things start to go a little bit easier between all of the siblings. They’ve bonded somewhat since Dad died, and all the revelations about powers and Five and shit have started them down the path to recovery.

But things don't really don't get pushed onto the road towards true healing and bonding until the night he finds Five curled up drunk on the ground in the laundry room and suddenly realizes that he sees himself in his brother. He recognizes that path of self-destruction. He recognizes that reaction to loss, the desire to destroy yourself in response to hurting the people you love most.

So Diego bends down and pulls that bottle of vodka from his little brother- because Five may be a fifty-eight-year-old assassin, but he's small and right now he's imploding and he needs someone, even if he won't admit it. Five lets him take it without a protest, and Diego knows that they're something seriously broken about his brother. He's not arguing, not putting up a fight like he did when they were trying to stop the Apocalypse. This is a very vulnerable version of the brother Diego just re-met.

That night, Five sleeps curled up in Diego's bed, and Diego feels the strangeness sense of protectiveness over this assassin. There's something clearly wrong with Five, something emotionally breakable, and Diego tries to imagine how isolating his years in the Apocalypse were. 

He can't truly do it. He doesn't think anyone can, other than five. He's at least had Pa- had  _people_ over the years. He's had general social interactions at the grocery store and on missions. He had two wonderful women who supported him, in their own ways.

Five hasn't even had those basics. For forty years, all he had was a mannequin. And that was it.

That would be enough to drive anyone insane.

So Diego holds his brother close and he swears that this time, he _will_ care. He's gonna help Five out as best he can, and not be afraid of caring too much.

Because Five is his brother, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with caring about him.

-

Diego finds Allison a few nights later standing outside of Five's room, a hand pulling the handle shut.

"Late night for you guys, too?" He asks, and she jerks up. He recognizes the stance her body moves into as a defensive one from their days in the Academy. It only takes her a moment to relax, though.

She nods. "He had a nightmare." She purses her lips. "Well, 'nightmare' probably isn't the best word to use. More like a bad memory."

Diego thinks about how Vanya and Klaus often end up curled up together to prevent bad dreams, how other nights he can hear Klaus and Dave at the end of the hallway talking deep into the night. He thinks about war and the Academy and the Apocalypse and how all of it can cause all kinds of trauma and damage.

He thinks about Five, tiny and drunk and clinging onto memories of a past that was objectively horrifying but the only thing that he can remember. "Yeah, I get it," he says, "I stopped him from drinking himself into oblivion a few nights ago."

Allison's eyes go wide for a moment before falling back to their normal size. "He's so small," Allison says quietly, "He's so old, but he's so small," and Diego nods. He understands. Dear god, he understands.

"He's our brother," Diego says, "And he's gone through as much shit as we have, and then some."

Allison nods. "And we weren't there for most of it."

Diego thinks about all the shit that they've all gone through that none of them supported each other through. Vanya being excluded and verbally abused, Klaus' drug addiction, Allison's divorce, Luther's years on the moon, Diego's time on the force and his transition process, Ben's death. Five's gone through a lot more shit, but they've all been alone and driven apart in their own ways. "I think most of us have gone through some shit that the others weren't there for. But now- now, we can help him heal."

Allison fixes him with a steady gaze, and Diego doesn't flinch.

She looks so old and yet so young at the same time. The scar on her neck is still rather dark and there are crows' feet around the edges of her eyes that weren't there the last time he saw her before Dad's funeral, six years ago at Ben's funeral. She's so mature, now, in a way she never was before. He wonders if it has to do with Claire or has to do with the fact that she's stopped using her powers, or if it's something of a mix of the two.

Diego wonders what she sees when she looks at him, if she sees the little boy straining to make the world see him for who he really was, bullying and scraping and pleading to get his way, or if she sees a half-broken man who's spent his whole adulthood clinging to the lies of superheroes he was told as a child.

"The three of us should really go grab dinner sometime soon," she eventually says, and Diego grins.

"I'd like that, and I think Five would too."

"Of course I would, you idiots," comes the voice from inside the room, and Allison giggles.

"This is gonna be great, Diego," she says. 

-

They start going to the diner every few days, him and Five and Allison. He starts to get to know his sister and his brother a bit better, and he really enjoys it. There's something incredibly normal and functional about the conversations between the three of them that Diego doesn't think they've ever had, even as children. 

-

Klaus bounds into his room one night after a particularly bad day and plants his ass directly in the middle of Diego's bed.

And he offers- Diego can't believe his offer. Klaus offers to bring Patch back, and suddenly Klaus finds himself with Diego's arms around him.

"Now, I don't have the emotional connection back to summon her permanently and make her corporeal and shit, but once I gain a little more strength I will," Klaus promises, and there's a lump in Diego's throat.

"Thank you," he says, and Klaus grins.

"Just want you to have what I do," Klaus says, voice fond, and Diego thinks about Dave and how his brother's been sober since he met the man. Diego's really thankful that Klaus met him and fell in love, even if the circumstances were less than fortunate.

-

Then, one night, in a hushed voice, Allison tells Five and Diego what Dad made her do to Vanya and Diego's fucking glad that their father's dead as a doorknob.

"You-you're a bastard, you know?" Diego says to the long-gone pile of ash in the courtyard after they get home that night. Vanya demolished all of the Reginald Hargreeves statues around the estate- good riddance, the abusive fuck- so this is the next best thing. "You fucked us all up. You drove Klaus to drugs and forced Allison to wipe Vanya's memory and sent Luther to the moon and killed Ben and nearly caused the Apocalypse that drove Five to become an assasin. You c-crushed me until I all I knew was how to strain to be the superhero I never could properly be.

The only good thing you ever f-fucking did was bring us together, but then you fucked us up in every conceivable way, so that's pretty damn cancelled out. Any good we've done was because of Mom and each other, not because of your sad excuse for a parenting style. 

In conclusion- get fucked, Dad."

"You're right, you know," a gruff voice says behind Diego, and he turns to see Luther standing there, looking awkward in his overcoat and in his agreement with Diego.

"Never thought I'd hear those words from your mouth," Diego says, a grim smile on his lips.

Luther shrugs, his mountain-like shoulders shifting with the grace of boulders. "Don't get used to it."

Diego snorts. "Don't worry, I never would."

Luther looks around, hesitating a bit awkwardly, before clearing his throat. "But what you said about Dad, about what he did to us- you have a point. He lied to us and nearly helped destroy us."

All of these are things that Diego never would have guessed that Luther would say, but things have definitely changed. Diego wonders when exactly Luther's opinion of Dad shattered. Was it the revelation about the Moon, or was it Vanya, or was it something else?

Whatever it was, Diego's glad that it happened and that Luther has finally pulled his head out of his ass. 

-

Luther starts to join Allison, Diego, and Five on their diner nights. At first it's a bit awkward, with all of the history between them all, but after a few braced conversations things start to get easier. Luther starts to open up just like they have, and soon enough Diego's starting to see him not as One, but as just another sibling. Luther's a bit better when he's not under Dad's influence- a bit broody and kind of a loner, but hey, Diego's the same so he can't really judge. The whole 'righteous leader' thing has really been toned down, and Diego's not sure why, but he appreciates it a lot.

Diego's been watching Luther heal and grow for weeks now, watching him soften and actually start to laugh at some of Diego's jokes and Five's snarky comments. Along the way, Diego's seen glimpses of healing from the rest of his siblings, too.

Allison's voice is getting better and she's being more open about the parts of her  _rumor_ that she locked way down. Five's started to soften and refrain from his instinct to snap at them, instead smiling instead of grimacing at their conversations. Vanya's powers have been expanding, her using music to channel her ability into creating art and helping their siblings as much as she uses it to destroy. Ben seems to be having a good time around them, hanging out and playing games and just generally acting alive and happy. Klaus is smiling, but it's not the smile of a suicidal junkie- no, these smiles are soft and gentle, given whenever Dave holds his hand or even speaks to Klaus.

It takes three weeks for Diego to realize that he's healing too. He's smiling more, regretting less, enjoying life more.

The Umbrella Academy was a total failure, but the Hargreeves siblings are not. Diego won't let them be, and to be honest, it looks like most of his siblings agree.

-

In L.A., Klaus summons Patch back and suddenly Diego is staring at his best friend, who's got a bloodstain on her chest but a cup of tea in her hand and a small smile on her face.

He doesn't know exactly what he and Patch are. They're not soulmates like Klaus and Dave, not mutual survivors like Dolores and Five. They were just best friends who slept with each other, and then they weren't even that. 

He doesn't know if he wants more with her, after everything that's happened. She died. (Okay, so she's pretty alive here, with Klaus, but she did die in the first place.) He's still alive. He doesn't know what he wants with her, whether he wants a relationship or friendship or something else.

But she's his best friend, and that means a lot whether or not he wants to pursue more of a relationship with her.

"Long time no see," Diego says, and she snorts.

"That's your line?"

"Well, you know me," Diego says, "I'm not exactly the best when it comes to words."

Patch's expression softens. "Nah, you've got plenty of words, and you know how use 'em." She holds up her mug. "Want to talk over a drink?"

Diego's face breaks into a smile. "Can't hurt."

-

Diego, Allison, Five, and Luther transfer their diner visits to a local diner that Allison swears by. It's not  _their_ diner, but it's still lots of fun.

"Maybe it's not about the location, but the people," Patch says when he tells her one night after he gets home from a diner visit, and he nods.

"You've always been pretty smart," Diego says.

"Can't be a detective without intelligence," Patch says.

Diego looks at her, at the sharp look in her eyes, at the detective's badge she still wears even after cleaning up her chest and changing her shirt a bit. She's always been the smarter of the two of them, the more clever one.

(It's what did her in, in the end.)

"So you and your siblings are getting along a lot better, now?" Patch asks, and Diego thinks about the way Five actually laughed at a joke tonight, about how Luther and Five are talking about their mutual love of the  _Chronicles of Narnia_ series (Diego thinks it might have something to do with talking animals and people getting stuck back in their young bodies), and Allison's visits with Claire bring up plenty of good stories.

"Yeah, I think so," Diego says, and Patch smiles.

"I'm glad."

Yeah, Diego thinks he is too.

-

Three weeks into their stay at Allison's house, the issue of space is brought up.

"Now, I love you guys, don't get me wrong," Klaus says, "But I don't think we can all keep living in Allison's house together. It's a bit cramped."

That's a bit of blunt way to start a conversation, but Diego gets the point so he doesn't comment. He's getting better at that.

"Where are we going to stay?" Ben asks. "Are we all going to separate again, go our different ways, or are we gonna stay together?"

Diego looks around at his family- at Five, and Allison, and Patch, and Vanya, and Ben, and Klaus, and Luther, and even Dave, whose hand is resting on his brother's thigh. Despite spending the past twelve years living on his own, only seeing them at funerals and Allison's wedding, he kinda feels like he can't give them up, now. Something has grown between them that is hard to let go of.

And fuck it, it may be him trying to compensate for the years they spent apart, but he's kinda okay with that.

But looking at it from a logical position, Ben, Patch, and Dave go wherever Klaus goes. They've done low-key experiments regarding the extent of his powers, and though he can now keep them corporeal for up to seven hours at a time, able to go a distance from him, but that once they go back to only being seen by him, he has to reconjure them next to him.

Diego knows he's going where Klaus goes, to keep up with Patch, but he can't imagine letting go of his late night conversations with Allison, Five, and even Luther, either.

"Does anyone really want to go back home to the mansion?" Allison asks, and Diego seriously ponders it.

Vanya's destroyed most of the parts of that place that haunted them- the statues of Dad, the mausoleum, the cell in the basement. Their bedrooms somehow feel more like theirs than they ever did when they were kids. Diego thinks of a dance, held in the hall and trips to the local diner with Allison and Five. And, of course, Mom and Pogo are still living at the mansion.

"I kinda like living there, nowadays," Diego says, and Patch's eyes go wide.

"Since when, Diego?" she asks, arching an eyebrow.

"Since I started to get to know these idiots again," Diego says, gesturing to his siblings, and he spots a wide grin on Allison's face, a half-smile on Luther's, and a small smirk on Five's. "And Vanya got rid of a lot of the physical shit haunting that house."

"Well, I wouldn't mind moving in," Klaus says with a shrug. "I mean, I don't exactly have a house at the moment, and we were doing pretty well there before this lovely visit." He looks to Dave and Ben. "How about you two?"

Dave smiles, nothing but love in his eyes. "I'll follow you 'til the ends of the earth, love."

Ben shrugs. "I'll come with you too."

"I'm gonna stay, too," Luther says, "Long as you guys are okay with it."

Diego recognizes the vulnerability it took Luther to say something like that, to acknowledge someone else's opinion as equal or even greater than his own. It's a skill that Diego at least somewhat learned from Patch in the outside world, but Luther never left Dad and thus never grew that sort of instinct. Diego's glad that he's picking it up now. Thirty years late is better than never, after all.

Klaus can't contain the glee in his eyes. "Sounds great to me, bro." 

"I want to stay in the mansion," Five says, and Diego watches as Five's gaze slides between Allison and Diego himself.

"I'll go with you," Diego says, looking at Patch, who gives him a small but almost proud smile.

"I'm on board," Vanya adds. "Diego does have a point- I  _did_ get rid of all the bad shit." Diego thinks he can almost detect a note of pride in her voice, and he totally gets it. When she destroyed the mausoleum and the basement prison and all the statues of Dad, she did what no one else could for thirty years.

Diego looks to Allison, who's staring down at her knees, teeth worrying over her lip as she thinks. For a moment of bated breath, she doesn't say a thing, instead holding the room in anticipatory silence.

"I'll talk to Claire," Allison says, "But I can act anywhere. And even if I didn't, I've got a support cushion a mile long and I have Dad's inheritance coming in. I don't have to worry about money." She looks up and at each of them, a small, fond smile on her lips. "And I just got all of you back- I wouldn't give up this family again just so that I could keep living in L.A."

There's something warm in Diego's chest that only grows bigger when Vanya stands up, walks over, and pulls Allison into a hug. Allison giggles and hugs her back, and Diego can see the tears in Allison's eyes.

-

Cha-Cha and Jack attack on the official "Move-Back-In-Day." It's a bit of a mess, especially considering the fact that Dave, Patch, and Vanya have never met Cha-Cha before and the whole assassination attempt kind of throws everyone a bit off kilter.

But at the end of the day, it turns out that shit can get solved pretty easily by Klaus' glowing hands and Ben's thirty-feet-long tentacles.

Cha-Cha and Jack may be coming back, but it won't be anytime soon.

-

"Do you think a lot of us have "upgrades" to our powers?" Diego asks that night, once their giant family is sitting down at the table. Diego's kinda shocked that they all can fit- Luther, Allison, Klaus, Dave, Five, Ben, Vanya, Mom, Pogo, Patch, and him- but on the other hand, he's actually pretty happy that they all can have dinner as a family.

"Well, I'm pretty sure that Vanya can't really  _get_ upgrades," Allison says, "Considering the fact that her current powers have been proven to be able to cause the Apocalypse. But the rest of us...I'd think so, yeah."

"I mean,  _you_ can already bend reality with your words, sis," Klaus says with a wave of the fingers, "So I don't really think that you can upgrade." Allison shrugs as if to say  _touche._

"I think that Five's already shown his," Patch says, "Time travelling seems like a bit of an upgrade from teleporting, right?"

Five gives Patch an appraising look. "Good point, Detective." Then he looks over at Ben. "What could monster tentacles grow into?"

Ben shrugs. "Dunno. They haven't really "upgraded" since death like Klaus' have." Ben looks over at Diego. "And what about you, Diego?"

"Still just curving things," Diego says, "But trust me, I'm down for more."

-

So Diego's living with his giant family in a mansion that used to haunt his dreams, and he thinks he's happier than he's ever been.

And sure, his life isn't normal, but fuck, has it ever been? Maybe it's a bit crazier than before- he's living with three dead people, one of which is a Vietnam veteran dating his brother- but this time around, he's got lots of support and a lot better relationship with his siblings. He's got trips to the diner every few nights, a biweekly bowling trip set up with Vanya, and he occasionally brings Klaus, Dave, and Ben on missions with him.

Most of the time, though, his partner on missions is Patch. She helps him with the more deduction-based aspects of his job, following criminals to their sources rather than just taking them out immediately. She gets her own mask, combat boots, and a darker jacket so that she can't be recognized by law enforcement. She's got some issues with the whole process, but this _is_ the closest she can get to continuing to keep the streets safe now that she's dead. After all, she's considered pretty dead by the government and it'd be a bit hard to explain the whole situation to anyone who isn't in the know.  

And two weeks after the whole Cha-Cha fiasco, Patch kisses him in an alleyway. Her lips are chapped and a little cool, but he can't deny that he hasn't ever been this attracted to someone before.

"Been waiting for that for awhile," Patch says with a smile, and he smiles right back.

"Gotta agree on that," he says, then leans in and kisses her again.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments and kudos are appreciated if you liked the story! I hoped y'all continued to like the series and would kindly like to leave a comment if so. The comments really motivate the fast pace of updates and, you know, just kinda make me happy inside.


End file.
